Also remember that huge corporations depend very extensively
on their ow n states. Every single one of the companies on the
Fortune 100 list of the largest transnational corporations has
benefited from interventionist industrial policies on the part of the
countries in w hich they’re based, and more than 20 w ouldn’t have
even survived if it w eren’t for public bailouts.
About tw o-thirds of the international financial transactions take
place w ithin and betw een Europe, the U S and Japan. In each of
those places, parliamentary institutions are more or less
functioning, and in none of them is there any danger of a military
coup. T hat means it’s possible to control, modify and even eliminate
the supposedly uncontrollable forces driving us tow ard a globalized
economy, even w ithout substantial institutional change.
The myth of Third World debt
All over the w orld, but especially in the U S, many w orkers vote
against their ow n interests—assuming they vote at all.
I’m not sure that’s true. Neither major party here represents
w orkers’ interests, but suppose there w ere candidates w ho did, and
that U S w orkers trusted them and w ere confident they’d try to do
exactly w hat the w orkers w anted. T here still might be a good
reason not to vote for them.
W hen poor people in Central America vote for their ow n
interests, the result is terror—organized and directed by the
superpow er of the hemisphere, and supervised on the local level by
the upper classes of that country. Many countries are so w eak that
they can’t really solve their internal problems in the face of U S
pow er; they can’t even control their ow n w ealthy. T heir rich have
virtually no social obligations—they don’t pay taxes and don’t keep
their money in the country.
U nless these problems are dealt w ith, poor people w ill
sometimes choose to vote for oppressors, rather than suffer the
violence of the rich (w hich can take the form of terror and torture,
or can simply be a matter of sending the country’s capital
somew here else).